Vail Valley: There must be profit in the energy business

Related Media

EAGLE COUNTY - The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones, and fossil fuels won't fold because we run out of dinosaur wine. It'll end because we come up with something better, said Arun Majumdar, a former top official with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Speaking earlier this spring at the Vail Global Energy Forum, Majumdar said the energy industry's primary function is the same as any other - to make money.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we've burned about 1 trillion tons of fossil fuel, Majumdar said. We have about 3 trillion tons of reserves. By providing it, companies will make tens of trillions of dollars.

"You cannot tell them not to earn that money. It's a false choice," Majumdar said.

"The job of research and development is to create options for businesses to use to make money," Majumdar said.

Kerosene made whale oil obsolete, and fossil fuels will suffer a similar fate, but not for a while, Majumdar said.

For now anyway, we have more natural gas than we can burn, about 100 years worth. That's because the natural gas industry is a modern technological marvel, said Jim Brown, Halliburton's Western Hemisphere president.

"Drill down two miles, drill horizontally two miles and hit a target the size of a coffee can. That's amazing," Brown said.

Most of the innovation in the natural gas industry came from a combination of competitive interplay and some federal funding, said Tom Petrie of Petrie Partners.

"They learned with every failure and eventually they figured it out," Petrie said.

Gov. John Hickenlooper said that back in the 1970s and 1980s, federal research money helped the oil and gas industry create revolutionary new ways to harvest those minerals. Hickenlooper said we'd do well to be more supportive of government funding for renewable energy, even when they go Solyndra on us.